What If God Is Smaller Than You Think?
By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible. (Hebrews 11:3 ESV)“He’s got the whole world in his hands”—so goes the chorus to the old song.
Big world. Far, far bigger hands.
Hands big enough to hold not just our world but the entire, mind-bogglingly vast universe.
It takes light about eight minutes and twenty seconds to traverse the 93 million miles from the Sun to our planet. Most of what we see strewn like diamonds across the night sky are historic images, stars as they appeared eons ago. And if you view the galaxy M109 through a telescope, you’ll be seeing how it looked 83.5 millionyears ago. Not exactly real-time.
God stands outside it all and, from his vantage point of timelessness and infinity, views it with a perspective very different from ours. That’s how big God is—imponderably big.
But—and here’s where it really gets fascinating—let’s take that thought in the opposite direction. Let’s get small.
Smaller than an ant. Smaller than a germ on that ant’s knee. Smaller than the molecular structure of that germ. Smaller—much, much smaller—than the atoms that make up one of those molecules.
Small to where the electrons whizzing in their orbits around their nuclei loom like planets circling a sun—and then smaller, smaller, smaller still, to the point where everything is space. Like the universe at large, only this is the universe at small.
There, at every point in that infinite smallness, God with undiminished authority and identity proclaims his name: I AM.
Size, distance, and time mean nothing to such a being. That’s why the apostle Peter could write, “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day (2 Peter 3:8 NIV). God is unlimited, operating both in the material world and outside it.
Call the stars by name? No problem. Catalog the hairs on your head? Certainly. He understands your thoughts from their very origin, from where your first thought led to the next to the next, down the domino chain of your thinking through the years and the decades to this moment (Psalm 139:1–4). He knows you that intimately and cares about you that much. He inhabits the minutest intricacies of your life.
The smaller God gets, the bigger he gets.
Is your God small enough to be as great as he is?